On 20/10/06, Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Earle Martin wrote:
I think Phil is speaking from having read numerous fictional character articles, not implying that his feelings stem from this incident. (I happen to agree with him; the amount of blithering fancruft is astonishing.)
Yet he's using this incident as his "excuse" for it. If this incident itself had nothing specifically to do with his proposal and he was just tossing in an old dream of his, why was it initially focused on just Marvel comics characters?
Because a wise man once said, "Pick the low-hanging fruit." Everything has to start somewhere, jihad on fancruft included.
There's reasons why BLP is "ruthless" with regard to biographies of living people and those reasons are completely inapplicable to biographies of fictional characters. If you want to propose being equally "ruthless" for fictional characters I want to see a reason that's just as strong.
I thought having an encyclopedia that didn't suck was a pretty strong reason. Do I need to elaborate on what I think that entails? I hope not; I would have thought it was fairly self-evident.
Also, the definition of "fancruft" is far less clear than the definition of "libel." I'd want to see something solid and widely accepted for that as well.
Okay, then, I'd like to throw that one out to the list, but I'll start with: unnecessarily verbose, gushing and hyper-detailed recitation of trifling details about a fictional element, contributed with a reverence better reserved for factual information. (Or, in the terms that I prefer, the dull and witless prattling of socially-impaired nerds, but that's only my opinion, and not a recommendation for policy wording.)